Good food. Homecooked in Perth

Tomahawk Steak

This is a post about meat, if you are at all not interested in large, juicy, flame grilled steak, look away now…

A week or so before Father’s day this year, my local butcher (Ryan’s Quality Meats) advertised a special gift pack consisting of nearly 1.5kg of Tomahawk steak and bottle of red wine. We were really impressed with this gift pack, well presented and came with the steak, chocolates, a bottle of Plantagenet red wine, apron and cooking instructions.

Now, on to the steak… this was a truly impressive piece of meat and I wanted to cook it very carefully to maximise flavour, and minimise any risk of ruining the steak.

The approach I followed treated this steak very carefully yet gave it fantastic flavour. My approach was to cook it sous vide for several hours (to get the steak evenly and perfectly medium rare) followed by an extremely high temperature sear over hot coals. This worked magnificently and I can safely say this is one of the best steaks I have ever eaten, let alone cooked.

Ingredients:

Tomahawk steak (1.5kg)

Salt

Pepper

Garlic Powder

Star Anise (1/3 of a star)

Butter

Methodology:

The process was fairly straight forward. First, start with a light rub. I mixed the star anise, and two tablespoons each of pepper and salt along with a teaspoon of garlic powder. This was blended to a fine powder and rubbed all over the steak and rib bone.

Once well rubbed, the steak was sealed in a vacuum bag and cooked sous vide for 4 hours at 56° I ran into a couple of problems with this… It turns out the steak was too big for my usual sous vide pot, even my larger stock pot was not large enough for this giant slab of delicious steak… instead, I had to fill my esky up with water. This also helped solve problem number two – which was having to relocate the cooking process to another house half way through (I wanted to finish the cook at my Dad’s house and crack open that bottle of red…). So, I threw the esky, full of hot water into the car and off we went. With the esky-sous-vide the steak was maintained at cooking temperature the whole time, even with a 20 minute car ride.

While the steak finished reaching core temperature, I prepped the BBQ (my trusty ProQ smoker) – mainly by dumping a full load of hot coals, chunk of apple wood, and putting the lid back on to get it to high temperature.

With the steak ready and BBQ at temperature I drizzled a bit of butter over both sides of the steak, removed the BBQ lid and slapped 1.5kg of tomahawk steak down onto the searing hot grill. Time was critical here, with only a pause for the appropriate photos and a dash of more butter to encourage the flames. I seared the steak for about 30s each side as well as the edges.

After being seared to absolute perfection, the steak was sliced and served along with roast potatoes, carrots, Béarnaise Sauce and a light salad.

The meat – oh my god the meat was amazing. Perfectly medium rare, a rich flavour from the gorgeous cut of steak and a rich seared and flavoured outer crust. My hat off to Ryan’s Quality Meats and Butterfield Beef – this was a truly magnificent cut of beef!